Page 10 of The Last to Vanish
With every new, unanswered question, something stirred.
CHAPTER 4
TREY WEST’S CAR WASstill in the lot when I returned from town. And it was still there when it was time for the shift change at one p.m.
Georgia filled me in on the guest updates just as a man from the laundry service left with the linens. “The Shermans are out on a hike,” she said, sliding the binder across the surface of the registration desk. The binder served as both a daily record and an ongoing conversation between the two of us. It was more reliable than any computer program, and we could adjust it at will. She’d made two tally marks beside the Shermans’ name on the open page—a running inventory of the walking sticks.
“Got it. Anything else?” I asked.
“Mountain View One lost their key,” she said with an eye roll.
“Did you give them the spare?”
“Yes, and cataloged the loss.” She pushed her hair to the side, eyes to the double doors. “He hasn’t checked out yet, you know,” she said.
“I can see that.” I grinned. “I’ll handle it. Hey, did the line go down again?” I asked, remembering what Marina had told me earlier in the day.
She frowned, a single worry line appearing in her forehead. “I don’t think so—”
I put a hand on her wrist as she reached for the phone. “Don’t worry about it. I was just checking.”
Georgia shrugged, then slipped into the back office, where I heard her dragging a chair across the floor—I could picture her, feet propped up, cell in hand, scrolling the news while she ate beside the windows, in the one location with the prime service. Since April, she always brought her lunch up here at the start of the day and stored it in the mini-fridge beside the cabinet with the safe, instead of sneaking back to her apartment for a bite or heading into town.
I picked up the phone, listened to the steady dial tone, then called the line for Cabin Four. By the fifth ring, I was about to hang up, when the line finally connected. A rustling, a pause, and then: “Hello?”
His voice sounded tentative and far away, like the receiver was nowhere near his face.
“Mr. West?” I said, leaning over the counter, to keep the conversation from drifting toward Georgia in the office. “This is Abby, at reception.”
“Oh.” I heard the phone juggling, coming closer to his face. “Hi.”
“I only ran your card for the single night, I’m sorry. How long were you planning to stay, so I can update your reservation?”
There was a delayed pause. “To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it,” he said. “I took off from work for the week, came down on impulse…” He trailed off, cleared his throat. “Sorry, is the room available for the rest of the week?”
“Through the weekend, yes.” I had a group of hikers on the calendar for two cabins next week, but they weren’t set to arrive until Monday. The cabins were never all booked far in advance.
“Okay, if you give me a minute, I’ll bring over the credit card.”
But Georgia was still in the office, and I was trying to keep herout of it, like Celeste requested.
“Actually, we have a happy hour each night, at five. Some drinks and appetizers in the lobby. I didn’t give you the full overview of our services last night, but if you swing by this evening, I’ll run your card then. And we can go over anything else.”
“Five,” he repeated. “Yes. Hey, is there food on-site normally? Like, for lunch?”
“No,” I said. “There’s a tavern at the edge of town.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the name, which now seemed offensive, in bad taste. “It’s the first place you’ll hit if you walk down. There are plenty of cafés scattered through the downtown, and ice cream shops. Sometimes there’ll be other vendors set up on the green. It’s all walkable. You can’t miss it.”
“Thanks, Abby.”
When I hung up, Georgia traipsed out of the back room. “Doing a walk-through before calling it a day,” she said. “Anything else you need after?”
Most afternoons, she handled the room turnover; said she found the cleaning and prepping a soothing routine. A simple monotony. Which was how she discovered Landon West’s empty cabin at one in the afternoon on his checkout date, two hours after it should’ve been vacated.
The problem, the police quickly realized, was that we weren’t sureexactlywhich day he went missing. He’d kept largely to himself, for his stay. And there wasn’t a daily cleaning service in the outside cabins.
By the time he was discovered missing, any trail that might’ve existed was untraceable. It had rained early that morning, a quick rush of water over the trails, the roads, the grass in front of the cabin.
It still haunted her, I knew. It haunted all of us.
